Java Annotated Monthly – May 2014

Here’s a few stories we’ve been reading on the Java beat this month, straight from the source. If you have any news or articles you would like to see here on the Java Annotated Monthly, you can reach me, Breandan dot Considine at JetBrains or @breandan.

Java

Java EE 8 Update – With the announcement of the Standard and Micro editions earlier this year, the final piece of the Java 8 puzzle has been announced, slated for release in Q3 2016. Read the draft proposal and add your feedback to JSR-342 by joining the conversation today.

Frameworks

What’s new in Play 2.3 – Introducing sbt-web, an asset pipeline for managing web assets with the Scala Build Tool. Play now bundles the Typesafe Activator, featuring browser-based code editing and elementary debugging for reactive applications. In addition to several performance enhancements and increased modularity, Play is also certified to work with Java 8. Read about platform direction and design rationale from James Roper, lead developer of Play Framework.

Apache Spark Release 1.0.0 – Spark is a fault tolerant cluster computing engine for machine learning and graph processing applications built on Hadoop. Learn more about resource management and YARN support on Spark from Sandy Ryza at Cloudera.

Mobile

libGDX 1.1.0 released – Close on the heels of 1.0, Badlogic Games ships another stable update to their widely hailed cross-platform game development framework, you can learn all about libGDX and how to get started from their lead developer, Mario Zechner. The latest version picks up support for i18n and the newly released…

RoboVM 0.0.13 – Making steady progress on the mobile unification front, RoboVM is allowing Android developers to write native iOS apps in Java, and with limited success, in Kotlin. Learn more about using RoboVM from Niklas Therning’s tech talk at ITT.

Community

An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development – Planning on a long flight? You’ll need a few hours to appreciate this tremendous review of modern Java development, on everything from lambdas to logging frameworks. Follow the links for extra credit.